April 10 (Bloomberg) -- Michael Gibbens, Toronto-Dominion
Bank’s global head of foreign exchange, is leaving the company
for personal reasons, Canada’s largest bank by assets said.

Gibbens will be replaced by Michael Twaits, who will
relocate from London to become the global head of foreign
exchange and metals, said Laurrell Mohammed, a spokesman for TD.
Twaits was formerly the international head of fixed income, he
said. Gibbens has not disclosed his future plans to TD,
according to Mohammed. He joined the company in 2002 as managing
director of foreign exchange and head of global institutional
sales in Toronto, the spokesman said. Gibbens could not be
immediately reached for comment.

Gibbens oversaw the creation of a new method of calculating
currency benchmarks that TD has offered to clients as an
alternative to the WM/Reuters rates, which are used to value
what Morningstar Inc. estimates is $3.6 trillion in assets
globally. The WM/Reuters rates are being investigated by
regulators around the world amid suspicion they have been
manipulated.

The Reuters rates are calculated once a day for 160
currencies based on trades executed in a minute-long period
called “the fix.” The method Gibbens developed with Paul
Aston, TD’s head of quantitative and algorithmic solutions, is
based on an average of trades throughout the day.

The large concentration of orders at the London fix
distorts prices and allows the possibility for manipulation,
while spreading out those orders helps solve both problems,
Gibbens told Bloomberg News when the new product was offered in
February.